It’s 2026, and everything is getting more expensive – your food, your gas, and even your favourite hockey team’s goals.
This off-season has been riddled with record-breaking contracts to players like Cale Makar and Macklin Celebrini.
Teams are only allowed to spend so much on their players. By design, records will be broken every few years because hockey’s salary cap expands regularly, and so does the maximum amount teams are able to pay a player every year.
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Next season, it’s a maximum of US$104-million, with a maximum of 20 per cent of that going to a single skater.
The production you get for that price matters a lot, and teams will be looking to get the best value from each player for their dollar.
So we imagined a new way to show how the money behind hockey is growing by answering a simple question: How has the price of a point, a save, or a hit changed over time?
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The Globe and Mail analyzed contracts signed between 2006 and 2026. This includes more than 3,600 contracts for players who average at least five points per season; about 3,900 contracts for players who average at least 20 hits per season; and more than 500 contracts for goalies who averaged at least 200 saves per season. We excluded players on an entry-level deal because they have no prior NHL production to evaluate.
For each contract or contract extension signed, we took the average annual value (AAV) of the player’s contract, in U.S. dollars, and divided it by the average annual points, saves, or hits for that player over their career at the time of signing to determine the cost at signing of each statistic the player is expected to produce over the course of the season.
To quote Billy Beane, once-general manager of the Oakland Athletics and portrayed by Brad Pitt in the 2011 movie Moneyball: “Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins. To buy wins, you need to buy runs.”
Or, in this case, points. So, let’s play moneyball. Er... moneypuck.
The market for points is nowhere near what it was for hockey legends past. In 1988, after nine seasons and four Stanley Cups, Wayne Gretzky signed a contract with the Los Angeles Kings worth more than $2-million a year in 1988 dollars.
At an average production rate of about 180 points per season with the Oilers, and adjusting for inflation, it works out to be about $35,000 per point in today’s dollars – roughly 12 per cent of what Makar’s goals cost this offseason.
Of course, a team needs to do more than score goals. It needs to stop them, as well, and hockey teams pay goalies to do just that.
So, in the spirit of Billy Beane, let’s build a championship team. That is, not buying players, but buying their points and saves.
The 2025-26 Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes skaters tallied roughly 760 goals and assists, and their goalies stopped about 1,700 pucks in the regular season.
In today’s league, that would run you about $102-million: the cost of championship production.
The Hurricanes, however, paid only $87-million in total payroll. It’s a massive bargain for that production – and the second-best bargain of any team in the league last year.
There’s also an argument to be made for a forward or defenceman’s value beyond just points. Over the course of a game, players are doing more than just scoring goals: they’re winning faceoffs, chasing pucks up the ice, avoiding (or taking) penalties, and of course: checking.
Grit has become a difficult-to-measure component of championship teams. The NHL only began tracking hits in the 2005-06 season.
So let’s take a look at one more thing: how much to buy a hit in today’s NHL?